Help wanted: school support staff

Scarcity of teacher assistants, custodians beyond norm in S.F.

Sep. 16, 2013

Kent Alberty

Written by

Mary Medema

Pam Homan

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The Sioux Falls School District had more than 60 open positions for classified staff on the first day of school this year. The number was higher than usual, said district officials who attributed the bevy of openings to low unemployment in Sioux Falls.

Typically, some classified positions — jobs that don’t usually require a college degree, such as custodians or educational assistants — are open during the first two weeks of school, officials said. But this year was an anomaly.

The number of such jobs still open stands at 21 as of last week. Most of openings are for educational assistants.

When the area unemployment rate is low, it can be more difficult to fill those positions, district officials said. Those positions usually are not full time and start around $10 an hour.

Sioux Falls’ unemployment rate is about 3 percent; the national average is 7 percent.

The school district advertises open positions and sends emails to parents and guardians on the school’s list to make them aware of the open positions. But beyond that, the district doesn’t have the means to actively recruit people for those positions, Superintendent Pam Homan said.

Each year, teachers move to the district from any of 10 to 15 different states, Homan said, but classified positions usually draw workers from the area, in large part because of the lower pay.

“We certainly advertise broadly, but they’d still have to move to the community to take this job,” Homan said.

Low pay leads to frequent exits

In the most recent district staff exit survey, classified staff reported the pay as their most common reason for leaving the district, followed by changing careers.

The school district is hardly unique when it comes to filling some of the lower-paying positions in the city.

Part-time jobs are waiting to be filled throughout Sioux Falls, with too few people to fill them, officials said — especially if a full-time job is needed.

“It is just a challenge to find the right people, people that have good work history ... and there are challenges at that low unemployment rate,” said Kent Alberty, school board member and co-owner of a Sioux Falls staffing company.

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Alberty said there seems to be a larger pool of applicants for professional positions, such as teachers. He said he’s open to looking into raising the hourly wage of the classified staff positions if a large number of positions are unfilled at the beginning of next school year.

When district employees start work, it can take more than a month to get paid for the first time, depending on when they start in the month, because employees are paid once a month, Alberty said. That might contribute to some of the lack of interest, he said, noting that many probably can’t afford to go more than one month without a paycheck.

He said he wants to work with Homan and the board to come up with a solution for that issue

Mary Medema, director of workforce development for the Sioux Falls Development Foundation, said she has seen this type of trend through the years.

She expects things to improve during the next few months for businesses or organizations looking for help, especially because of the holidays that tend to generate a supply of people looking for part-time work for extra cash.

“It’s easy for people to find employment, there are a lot of choices for people, if they’re available to work part time,” Medema said. “It’s just a trend that takes place periodically before it settles a little and returns to more of a balance.”